Birthdays are a natural time for reflection, even if you’re only five years old, which is the age that Twitter officially turned today. It may not seem like much, but that’s about 35 in Internet years, which means the company is close to being middle-aged — and Twitter has definitely been struggling with some mid-life challenges lately. Another much-hyped web startup also just had a birthday recently: Digg, which turned six in December, has been struggling as well, after a failed redesign and the departure of founder Kevin Rose. And Digg’s decline from pioneering service to also-ran contains some lessons for its fellow social-media service.
In some ways, it’s hard to believe that Twitter has been around for five years. The service that Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone originally launched as a side project within Evan Williams’ company Odeo — which was later shut down, with Williams taking over from Dorsey as CEO of Twitter, in a move that reportedly caused some bad blood — didn’t seem like much when it first launched, even to Om. Like most users, I thought the service was fairly useless when I joined in early 2007, and I spent months wondering what I was supposed to do with it before a critical mass of friends and other interesting people joined, and it began to come to life.
Twitter’s status as a powerful real-time news platform didn’t really become clear until it was used to transmit updates about the forest fires in California in 2007 and during an earthquake in China in 2008. Gradually, people started to see it as something other than just a way of talking about what you were having for lunch — and when Janis Krums used Twitter to post a picture of a plane crash-landing in the Hudson River in 2009, the reality of Twitter as a news-publishing system started to go mainstream. Every subsequent event, from terrorist attacks in Jakarta to the earthquake in Haiti, has reinforced the idea that the service lowers the barriers to entry for publishing, as Evan Williams put it last year.
The most recent example was the use of Twitter and Facebook by dissidents in Tunisia and Egypt to co-ordinate demonstrations and uprisings against their governments, and the compelling stream of news from participants that was carried out of Tahrir Square by Twitter to the world, thanks in part to real-time news aggregators like Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who created what was effectively a one-man wire service.
More than anything else, however, Twitter has become a platform for community — whether it’s a community of people interested in revolutions in the Middle East, or a community that is obsessed with the latest product release from Apple, or a community that wants to know what John Cusack or Steve Martin think about current events. And one of the hallmarks of a social service like Twitter and Facebook is that the more people use it to connect with each other around things they are passionate about, the more they feel like they own it to some extent — and that feeling is what Twitter is currently fighting as it tries to mature as a company.
You can see that in the outraged responses to the recent Quick Bar fiasco, and to the shutting down of third-party clients like Bill Gross’s UberMedia — which has been trying to develop its own competing monetization strategy for the social network — and to the rollout of services such as Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. As I’ve argued before, users have grown so used to seeing Twitter as a utility that every move the company makes to add money-making layers or to control its ecosystem is seen as an affront in some sense, like someone invited you to a party at their house and now is asking you for money or putting up turnstiles and imposing all kinds of rules on your behavior.
Although the two services are different in many ways, Digg has also been struggling with the same kinds of issues — and some of those struggles are directly related to Twitter, since Digg’s link-sharing features, which were once a pioneering example of what some called Web 2.0, have arguably been overshadowed by the growth of Twitter. But Digg has also rolled out its own poorly-received design features: the service launched Digg v4 last August and the new design was roundly criticized as unstable and (more importantly) a breach of faith with the traditional Digg community. The site’s traffic plummeted, the new CEO rolled back most of the new features and laid off almost 40 percent of the staff, and founder Kevin Rose is moving on to start a new venture.
So what are the lessons that Digg has to teach Twitter? One is that even pioneering services, whose founders appear on the covers of leading business magazines, can be overtaken by events, and by other services that don’t even exist yet. Yes, it’s true that Twitter is supposedly worth $10 billion, and is much larger than Digg ever was — but that lesson still applies (as MySpace is well aware). And the other lesson is that the core of a social network is the community of users, and arguably in Twitter’s case the community of developers as well, or the “ecosystem.”
Alienating either or both of those groups is a very risky strategy, as Digg has discovered. It could pay off in Twitter’s case, but it could also ruin one of the key features that make the network so powerful and compelling, and that is something that would be very difficult — if not impossible — to recapture.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Will Clayton